THE FIRST GOOD WEEK OF BIDEN’S PRESIDENCY: “It’s been another eventful week in President Joe Biden’s America. The stock market plunged 5 percent as inflation soared to new highs and recession fears continued to mount. The number of COVID-19 deaths on Biden’s watch surpassed 600,000 while his approval rating fell below 40 percent. That’s not great! Nevertheless, it was still a relatively good week in the context of Biden’s failed presidency. Two of the most obnoxious Ivy League libs in American history—Chesa Boudin and Felicia Sonmez—were fired for reckless behavior. For a demoralized country in need of some good news, it is reason enough to rejoice.”
Archive for 2022
June 12, 2022
PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Who’s Next: The Times does Biden.
The New York Times has posted the Biden variant of the “Dump Feinstein” campaign that Steve has been tracking. In an alert to subscribers, the Times directs readers to Reid Epstein and Jennifer Medina’s story on the “Democratic whispers” that perhaps Biden should step aside in 2024 (and announce his decision to do so after the midterms). This just in: Democrats fear he may not be up to the task. And you thought the Times has lost its nose for news.
Earlier: The Democratic Party’s Ice Floe Politics:
The Democratic leadership is also very old. The average age of the Democratic House leadership is 70 (compared to 53 for Republicans); Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is 80; her lieutenants Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn are 81 and 80, respectively. Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is a comparatively spry 70.
The liberal mainstream media occasionally comments on the age of Democratic leaders: New York magazine lamented the “Gerontocracy of Democratic Party Leadership” back in 2016, as did The New Republic in 2019 (“The Democrats are Too Old”), but they did so as part of an effort to paint Feinstein as senile and thus incapable of doing activists’ bidding during Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, not as a matter of general concern.
“Republicans were stealing another seat” on the high court, TNR claimed, and “Feinstein conducted the hearings as if they were occurring in a normal political environment.” She even had the temerity to hug her colleague Lindsey Graham, which was, in the liberal media’s eyes, a clear sign of senility.
In other words, Democrats prefer to ignore the age issue until it becomes useful as a justification for pushing out someone who is no longer useful to the party.
It’s a cynical tactic that will continue to create odd political moments, such as Nancy Pelosi shimmying after the passage of the recent COVID relief bill or older Democratic leaders kneeling in kente cloth in support of Black Lives Matter (and struggling to get up afterward). Those displays make older Democrats paradoxically seem less like vigorous leaders and more like advertisements for assisted living communities that strenuously highlight all of the things “active seniors” can still do.
The next time a Democratic politician makes an anonymous observation about the age or vigor of a colleague with whom they disagree, be skeptical. The remarks are made to reporters as if in sorrow, but the message is about as subtle as a shiv in the prison yard.
In 2010, Obama used that sort of language in an effort to toss fellow Democrat Charlie Rangel under the bus:
President Barack Obama has kept mum on the fate of Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) for days — but he tells CBS News that it’s time for the embattled 80-year-old former Ways and Means Chairman to end his career “with dignity.”
“I think Charlie Rangel served a very long time and served– his constituents very well. But these– allegations are very troubling,” Obama told Harry Smith in an interview to be aired on the “Early Show.” and first broadcast on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.
“And he’ll– he’s somebody who’s at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I’m sure that– what he wants is to be able to– end his career with dignity. And my hope is that– it happens.”
Rangel hung on for another six years in office, retiring at the age 86.
AS SAN FRANCISCO BACKS OFF FROM STUPID CRIME POLICIES, BOSTON PREPARES TO GO ALL IN: Will Michelle Wu stop the power grab by arrogant Boston city councilors?
Amid troubling signs of a potential summer crime increase, Mayor Michelle Wu is in the unenviable position of settling a power grab by unhinged city councilors and “defund the police” advocates against the city’s powerful cop unions.
Wu has just days to decide whether to accept a $13.3 million cut in the Boston Police budget and pay raises for City Council staff approved by newly empowered councilors.
Wu could amend the budget however she likes, including to restore some of the cuts to police, but the council could override her decision with a two-thirds vote.
Wu’s original budget proposal included only a 1% cut in the police budget, but it’s unclear now how willing she will be to take on the City Council, a body she used to lead. . . .
The $13 million cut in the police budget — mostly coming from overtime — would be funneled back to youth programs and to the council itself, which wants to raise the pay of its staffers.
Boston managed to avoid most of the George Floyd violence and crime, and I guess they’re disappointed by that.
STILL TRUE TODAY: The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. #CommissionEarned
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: District drops Title IX investigation into middle schoolers who used ‘incorrect’ pronouns.
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: ‘Why Socialists Should Become Teachers’: Radicals train students to organize for ‘social justice.’ “Social Justice” is to justice as military music is to music.
DEAL OF THE DAY: LED Flashlight Gloves. #CommissionEarned
ROGER KIMBALL: The ‘Get Trump’ Show: It is never the pretext—-putative Russian collusion or protests at the Capitol—-that is at issue but rather the ontological unacceptability of Trump and all he stands for. “The Democrats went all-out with this entertainment. I cannot, however, pronounce it an unqualified success. Nor did the public, which mostly reacted with a yawn.”
Plus: “The January 6 Committee has taken up where the Mueller show left off. The great difficulty for both shows is their utterly incredible premises. Donald Trump did not ‘collude’ with Russia or kowtow to Vladimir Putin. With every passing month we know with greater clarity that that entire $34 million entertainment was cooked up by Hillary Clinton and her agents. Which is why former Attorney General Bill Barr, no friend of Donald Trump, just opined on Glenn Beck’s podcast that Clinton might be guilty of sedition in her covert attack on Trump. . . . It’s the same with the January 6 jamboree. The whole raison d’être of the January 6 committee is to show that Donald Trump colluded with various nefarious forces—in this week’s episode, it’s the paramilitary group called the Proud Boys—to stage a ‘coup’ and ‘overturn’ the 2020 election. The problem is that the unruly protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was neither an ‘insurrection’ nor an attempted coup.”
WELL, THE JANUARY 6 HEARINGS WERE A SHOW TRIAL: “History will accept only one Jan. 6 narrative. This committee has it.”
Ann Althouse comments: “I’m reading that only because the headline bothered me so much that I felt that I needed to know how any educated, intelligent person could say such a thing. What a static, impoverished view of history! He seems to have it mixed up with propaganda — specifically, the propaganda of a totalitarian state.”
Plus, if you’re a Republican and getting “gooey fawning” from the WaPo, you’re probably not really a Republican.
BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Climate ‘fuhrer’ ripped for urging censorship of Biden critics.
I mean, fuhrers gonna fuhrer.
#JOURNALISM: “[I]f it’s not part of something that feeds our narrative, f–k it, we bury it.”
That’s Bill Maher, channeling Jim Treacher.
TO PROTECT AND SERVE? “Eighty minutes. That’s the amount of time that elapsed on May 24 between the first report of trouble at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and the moment the gunman was shot and killed. We are understandably dismayed by this. How, we ask, when there were so many police officers at the school within minutes of the first 911 call, can it have taken so long to confront the gunman?”
June 11, 2022
THEY DO SEEM TO BE DROPPING LIKE FLIES:
OPEN THREAD: Everybody’s groovin’ to their own song. Plus: “With great sorrow we say, that this video is way better than all Fast & Furious movies since 2006.”
MARK FELTON: East German Boy Scout Tank Unit (Video).
NEO: School police chief Arredondo speaks.
“Everybody knows” that the cowardly Uvalde cops sat in the hall for over an hour while children were being shot and school police chief Arredondo gave the order to stand down, although of course the officers could have gotten the key or breached the doors or shot through the doors without hurting any children.
Except that we don’t know those things, although there certainly have been reports in the MSM stating them as facts or as obvious conclusions – much or all of the specific information coming from anonymous sources.
I would say that probably the vast majority of people who’ve followed this story believe a lot of things that haven’t been proven and that originate with unnamed sources talking to the MSM, or “experts” or pundits not paying attention to what we actually know and what we don’t. Haven’t we learned from previous experience not to trust those initial reports, especially anonymous ones, and to suspend harsh judgment until a lot more is known? And doesn’t that take time?
I’ve been asking a lot of questions as I try to sort it out. One of the things I’ve been waiting for is to hear from school police chief Arredondo. Well, now wait no more. You are free to think he’s lying through his teeth in his description of the ordeal, of course. But I think he just might be telling the truth.
Read the whole thing.
SO WHY WERE CORPORATIONS SO MUCH LESS GREEDY A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO? “More money than God”: Biden doubles down on “corporate greed” as excuse for inflation.
THE ROMANS WERE JUST LIKE US: “Sometimes, like today, dicks of questionable artistic merit were used to make fun of people.”
MAYBE SKIP THE ORGIES THIS MONTH? Monkeypox symptoms can mimic STDs, be misdiagnosed, CDC says.
But maybe it actually is an STD of sorts: Monkeypox Outbreak Primarily Spreading Via Sexual Contact: WHO Officials.
GOOD ADVICE: Mark Judge: Do Not Let The Washington Post Raise Your Sons. “Washington Post reporter Emma Brown has a new book out. It’s called To Raise a Boy: Classrooms, Locker Rooms, Bedrooms, and the Hidden Struggles of American Boyhood. It’s a guide to raising boys. But Brown knows much more about destroying human males than nurturing them. I know. I was one of her victims.”
BILL MAHER: The Times buried the Kavanaugh assassination story because he’s a conservative.
Katrina Trinko remembers how the Gabby Giffords shooting, perpetrated by a genuine random lunatic, was immediately and egregiously coopted by the media as an indictment of tea-party agitation against Democrats. But the supreme example of the double standard will forever be the attempt by an ardent Bernie-loving progressive to mass-murder Republican congressmen on a baseball field in 2017, news that would have been treated as a national trauma on the order of a major terrorist attack had the partisan roles been reversed. As it is, the story fizzled after a few days and probably would have fizzled sooner if not for the subplot of Steve Scalise fighting for his life in the hospital. Trinko:
[W]hen it comes to political violence in the United States today, here’s a maxim you can always rely on: If the victim or likely victim is on the right, the perpetrator is simply a lone wolf. But if the victim or likely victim is on the left, the perpetrator was fueled by dangerous rhetoric…
Sure, the justices have been given some additional security. But where is the outrage from top liberal lawmakers and activists? Where are the calls for people to remember that at the end of the day, no matter how vehemently we disagree on certain policies, we are all Americans who should be working together to resolve our differences?…
Here’s the reality: Corporate media and liberal lawmakers probably aren’t going to rush to highlight the horrific assassination attempt on Kavanaugh. They know that moderates will be horrified to discover how commonplace it has become for Supreme Court justices to face protests at home. (Notice how little coverage the corporate media has given to these protests, despite the fact that they are publicly announced ahead of time.) And they don’t want to risk alienating the extremists on their own side by focusing on this.
Left-wing agitators understand that they operate free of scrutiny from major media. It’s why the same group that doxxed the Court’s conservative members last month felt no compunction about advertising a new protest at Amy Coney Barrett’s home even after the news broke about a threat to Kavanaugh.
Flashbacks:
● Reagan historian: Releasing Hinckley signals it’s OK to target conservatives.
● Sen. Rand Paul had part of his lung removed this weekend because of damage from 2017 attack.
● Actor Jeff Daniels to CBS’s Stephen Colbert: ‘We Need Someone That Can Punch Trump in the Face.’
● Ilhan Omar Retweet Suggests Rand Paul Deserved to Be Assaulted.
● Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) to 2020 Dems: Don’t Run Away from Trump — ‘Punch Him in the Face.’
● Joe Biden: I Want to ‘Beat the Hell Out of’ President Trump.
● Patti LuPone defends violent attack on Rand Paul.
● CNN Host Palled Around with, Promoted ICE Firebomber’s Antifa Group.
● Leftist Thug Caught on Video Assaulting Conservative Berkeley Student While Fellow Students Laugh.
● Journalist Andy Ngo Beaten Up at Portland Antifa Rally.
● John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.”